1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to messaging systems and, in particular, a system and method for retrieving and consolidating messages from various messaging services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Presently, many voice-mail and e-mail users have multiple accounts for each type of messaging service, for example, e-mail accounts with at least one internet service provider, and one or two business e-mail and voice-mail services. These e-mail and voice-mail services are usually stored in separate mailboxes in different messaging services. In order to retrieve messages, send messages, reply or conduct other business, users must access each individual mailbox in turn. These mailboxes typically have different access methods, different devices, different authentication procedures, different feature sets, and different user interfaces.
Attempts have been made to create a unified messaging system that provides for a single electronic mailbox for different types of messages. These attempts have been limited to a premise-based exchange ("PBX") which interconnects digital telephones and personal computers. A PBX typically provides voice messaging service and electronic mail messaging service. Attempts have been made to route new messages from the internal voice messaging service and electronic mail messaging service to a system processor within the PBX thus consolidating a user's messages within the PBX. Such attempts to create a unified messaging system may work within a PBX where all activities occur within one switching system; however, such a premise-based messaging system has no means for detecting messages that are external to the PBX, nor does a premise-based messaging system have the capability of retrieving messages from external messaging services. Thus, users must still periodically log onto each external mailboxes to check whether or not that system has any messages for the users.
It is therefore desirable to have an intelligent network messaging agent that is capable of polling various messaging services a user subscribes to, retrieving all new messages, saving the new messages in a single mail repository for a later retrieval by the user, and notifying the user of the new messages.